Bela Tarr’s Satantango: A Film Beyond Cinema

A dilapidated barnyard, sounds of distant church bells that knell in muffled melancholy, herd of cows languidly move in disharmonic patterns. Cows openly fornicate and graze in the morning light of freedom. The wide monochrome captures the herd ambling about in the town. Gently, the trail of cows passes through decrepit houses; teething walls, unnerving silence shrouds the vast stretch of emptiness in this town. The cattle are set free, a sense of freedom that the humans in this town will pursue unyieldingly. The ten minute opening sequence takes us into auteur Béla Tarr’s seven hour epic, Satantango , a story about post-communism Hungarian townspeople, utterly engulfed in an apocalyptic collapse through moral degradation. Irimiás, the wicked-piper of the story drives them to their peril aided by what one of the character calls “idle passivity that leaves them at the mercy of what they fear most”.

Much as the name suggests, like the tango, the narrative non-linearly moves six steps forward and six steps backward in episodic style ( Look for the linearized episodes at the bottom). Based on a novel by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the film is an inclusive study on human condition, the bleakness of being, rather than merely remaining to the confines of cinema. The Schmidt and Kraner families have decided to flee the town with farm money that has been collected for the past year and a half. Futaki, their neighbor, finds out about the scheme and demands for a share. Irimiás, who was understood to be dead, has returned after two years. The narrative sees multiple points of views of how the town deals with the fear of this news, the ensuing machinations that they plot against each other. As more people join, news about Irimiás and Petrina coming to town engulfs the town in trepidation. Irimiás, following his return, schemes to con the townspeople into a grand plan when Estike, a supposedly demented girl, has died. He uses her death to bring out the guilt in people and gets them to agree to his plan as a way to their redemption.

At the periphery, we may see a coherent plot but Tarr’s is not entirely focused on narrative. He looks cinema from a cosmic dimension, a close study on human condition and it’s equation with nature and society. This differentiates him from every other filmmaker of his time. It took over six years to make this film. In one of his interviews, Tarr mentions that story is a secondary thing for him; he is interested in how close one gets to life.

The film has numerous long takes averaging around ten minutes, painstakingly choreographed and shot in black and white, which has now become his trademark style. Tarr uses a cut only as a logical break in chain of events. It would take away the realism if he had deployed the conventional edit pattern, understanding the importance of real time. In effect the viewer is transformed to the space-time of the narrative, vicariously replacing the camera. The first part of the film centers inside a house with the Schmidts and Futaki arguing over the money. The third part sees the same sequence from the window of the town doctor. The doctor is chronicling these events in his diary and meticulously makes drawings about it. Both sequences are long takes with almost no cuts. Had there been an intercut between the two scenes, it would have become the audience’s vision from a cinematic point of view as against the audience’s vision of being in the space-time of the character. When asked about his love for Long takes, Tarr had this to say

The people of this generation know information-cut, information-cut, information-cut. They can follow the logic of it, the logic of the story, but they don’t follow the logic of life. Because I see the story as only just a dimension of life, because we have a lot of other things. We have time, we have landscapes, we have meta-communications, all of which are not verbal information. If you watch the news it is just talking, cutting, maybe some action and afterwards talking, action, talking. For us, the film is a bit different.

Tarr’s long takes are not merely an exploration of stylistic art of life continuity but also adherence to realism in his atmosphere. He maintains the necessary character claustrophobia. The film deploys what I call as the beauty of the tedium in its favor. In traditional cinema we are used to cutting away swiftly, like from a character exiting the frame or some events that are trivial to the script or the narrative are cut off. Tarr explores the beauty of ordinary things, the little unimportant things we do in life, which filmmakers tend to ignore.

For instance, the same sequence of the old doctor chronicling the town in his diary is shot in a closed room that is dimly lit. We see him sipping his fruit brandy, filling the glass, taking a pee break, shifting through his notes, sketching, moving uncomfortably around the room, dozing off in the middle, injecting himself with medication, walking painfully in the rains to fetch a pail of fruit brandy and many such little details, all in a single long take, which seem grating to watch but they make you live the tedium that the character is going through, character claustrophobia as said before. You are transferred into the room, you watch the doctor passing out helplessly and wait till he returns to consciousness. Fantastic use of sound is also used to capture this realism. The squeaking door, the footsteps, panting, snoring and such diegetic sounds are more pronounced in the film to accentuate the ordinary in our lives. Tarr takes special care in non-diegetic sound which adds to the atmosphere of the premise. A recurring sound of a moving spaceship fused with church bells is heard in most of the scenes, lending an eerie apocalyptic vision to the narrative. And then again the same sound is juxtaposed with a cat’s purring making the end seem closer and scarier. One of the most smart sound techniques is the use of ticking clock in an extended scene preceding the final act (non-diegetic). The ticking clock almost obtrudes the conversation, adding to the discomforting wait for the demon to arrive and the fact that you can’t see the clock anywhere, adds to the discomfort.

Though I have appetite for gore and violence on screen but I was disturbed by a sequence in the film, so much so that I had to look away from the screen, however, it still is the best scene I have ever seen on cinema. A little girl, Estike is known by the village to have become insane. Her introductory scene has her digging the ground with her brother and planting all her savings in a cloth. He brother cons her into growing a “money plant” with this method only to discover her money being taken away by her brother. She is devastated. Soon after this, she is left in a loft outside the house with a cat. As she plays with the cat, she realizes the cat is weaker than her. She torments the cat to elicit some resistance. The little girl has shown brilliant restraint to hide her discomfort in torturing the cat. She feeds the cat with poison and watches it die gradually. This episode and what she does after this form the turning point in the film. Though Tarr has said in an interview that a vet was on the set during this scene and the cat is now his pet, because of this scene the film was withheld for a release in the UK. In its minimalist style this scene explores beyond the mise-en-scene; we can see the years of physical abuse that this little girl has seen in the house. She has lived with the memory of a father who hanged himself, sisters who have turned hookers for money. Towards the end of the film we realize the father hung himself by a rope in the same loft that the girl kills the cat. Though this is not shown but can be connected through the chain of events. Most haunting image of the girl is when she is peeping through the glass window while the townspeople engage in a long dance. You can almost see her questioning “what is sanity”, her angelic face glowing with the higher consciousness that she is about to witness out of this tragic act. I almost felt like this where Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon picks up from.

Satantango has one of the most interesting tracking shots in cinema. The opening sequence tracks the herd of cows for over 150 meters, panning languidly to the left for a long time. More than the usages of tracks the way they have been deployed are noticeable. My favorite shot in the film is this long tracking shot from behind where we see the debris on the road being blown away by the wind, never mind that you are aware of the wind machine all the while. Irimiás and Petrina are walking in the middle of all this. It’s visually stunning and is the best tracking shot in the film

Some circular tracks (or steadycam maybe) make you wonder how it would have been shot. In one sequence where Tarr attempts satire to show the conversation between two corrupt officers, the camera revolves around them for whole ten minutes and you don’t even notice the movement. There is great writing in this scene to expose the bourgeois interpretations of the farm life. Irimias has sent a report of each town person in tone which is rather steep and full of expletives. The officers manipulate the lines to make them part of the official records. Like Mrs Schmidt, according to Irimias’ report says “She went to bed with anyone and everyone, and if she didn’t that was only by accident”. They change the line to: “She’s a paragon of conjugal infidelity.” After the whole thing they leave and the voiceover tells us that they both were asked about the day’s proceedings, to which they replied “Nothing much, the usual, my dear.” In another circular track, from a top angle camera, we see the characters sleeping and the voice-over narrates their dreams. In most tracking shots we see characters are walking and the camera doesn’t let go. Even after a point when the camera holds back, it patiently waits for the character to walk away until they reach the horizon over the bog covered town.

Tarr is not particularly interested in making a political statement or a social comment through the film. After finishing the seven hours, you’d feel like you have lived with these characters, in this town, for almost a lifetime. That is the effect of his art and the process of filming life rather than cinema. In a way it’s Hungarian but universal in its theme. The sodden landscape, the incessant rain, the bog enclosed town, teething walls, leaking ceilings, windstorms are settings for the characters who are led by deceit, hunger, greed, suspicion, naiveté and unremitting poverty into their own moral cataclysm. Satantango is a work of exceptional art. It’s one of the greatest films of the last century, eschewing every single convention of cinema, innovating and reinstating the remodernist that Tarr has come to be known as. I wrote this review for two reasons; one that this film has not been seen by many because of its daunting length or it’s glacial pacing or largely because it has been unavailable for screenings around the world. This masterpiece is not known to many and it should be watched, for such an innovative work of art should get its due. Secondly, Tarr has made very few films in his life. He has uncompromisingly stuck to his style of filmmaking; one of the truest auteurs of our generation (closest heir to Tarkovsky and Bergman according to me, many may not concur), has decided to end his career as a filmmaker. His latest and last film, The Turin Horse, won the grand jury prize at Berlinale this year. Satantango is the best film of his career and it has to be seen, discussed, and debated by all. I am making one such attempt here to document what I felt about the film. I hope that he continues to make films and inspire generations.

PS: I have tried to write the 12 episodes of the film linearly here. [SPOILER ALERT]

1) A hír, hogy jönnek [The News Of Their Coming] : Opens with a long take of dawn arriving at a window, Futaki and Kraner family plotting to leave the town with the money. Futaki has slept with Schmidt’s wife the previous night.

2)Feltámadunk [We Will Rise from the dead]: Irmias and Petrina arrive and meet the law inspector who asks them to collaborate to survive. They come to the town to intimidate people at a pub.

3) Valamit tudni [To Know Something]: This takes one step backward from the first episode where the town doctor sees the whole scene from his dingy one room apartment. He then goes out of the house in search of fruit brandy.

4) A pók dolga I. [The Spider’s Work I]: People are at the pub and discussing about the unbearable rains and the wait. An old man comes and informs about the arrival of Irimiás and Petrina. Mrs Schmidt can smell the earth rotting but the bartender tells her it’s the coal and cobwebs that smell.

5) Felfeslők [Those Coming Unstitched]: The painful story of the little girl who is cheated by her own brother for money. In moment of displaced sense of power, torments and kills a cat. She later cannot consume the guilt and kills herself with the same rat poison she fed the cat with.

6)A pók dolga II (Ördögcsecs, sátántangó) [The Spider’s Work II (Devil’s Nipples, Satan’s Tango)]: People at the pub do the demonic tango waiting for the dreadful Irimiás to come. Estike, the little girl sees this from the window ( A succeeding part of the girls story). Episode ends with cobwebs gently forming all around the glasses.

7) Irimiás beszédet mond [Irimiás Gives a Speech]: Irimiás uses the girl’s death to use it in his favor to convince the townspeople that they are cumulatively accountable for the loss. In his speech he cons them into his grand plan.

8)A távlat, ha szemből [The Perspective From the Front]: The villagers are convinced and leave the town with all their belongings.

9)Mennybe menni? Lázálmodni? [Going To Heaven, Having Nightmares]: Irmias is arranging for explosives in a bar. There is a sequence where the characters are sleeping in an abandoned building and we hear their dreams/nightmares being narrated in a recurring circular tracking shot.

10) A távlat, ha hátulról [The Perspective From Behind]” : The townspeople show some sense of rationale and rebel against Irimiás which is immediately put off. They again fall for the grand plan and are asked to scatter around the country.

11) Csak a gond, a munka [Just Trouble and Work]: This has two government officials typing out Irimiás’ report on the towns people. Here Tarr attempts satire through the funny improvisations used by the officials on Irimiás’ report.

12) A kör bezárul [The Circle Closes]: Final act of the doctor returning with fruit brandy. He closes himself in to the room, nails wooden planks on the windows and starts to narrate the initial opening lines of the film.